The 2 Faces Of At&t In Orlando

January 20, 1986|By Tim Smart of The Sentinel Staff

Every month, 2.5 million pieces of mail, all of them bills, flow out of a 100,000-square-foot, white building in south Orlando. The paper is the work product of more than 500 employees, whose primary mission is keeping track of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s business customers across the country.

Situated just north of where the Florida Turnpike bisects the Beeline Expressway, the building is the Orlando Data Center for AT&T's Information Systems group, which is Ma Bell's computer and telecommunications equipment manufacturing arm. The center handles bills for all of the group's business customers, as well as processing the majority of the paychecks for the division's 100,000 employees. The center also handles assorted data processing and accounting services for AT&T.

Today, the center serves the information systems group only. But with recent changes in the divestiture agreement that broke up AT&T in 1984, it is highly probable that the center will be used by other groups within AT&T. For example, after the Bell breakup, the local telephone companies began handling customer billing for users of AT&T's long-distance service. Those contracts are set to expire soon, and there is speculation in the industry, which the company has not denied, that AT&T will take over its own billing.

''Probably over the next couple of years, you will see a merger of data processing over all functions,'' said James Collins, division manager of the Orlando data center.

The data center has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week since early 1984, although it traces its history to 1982, when a group of AT&T employees chose Orlando as the place to begin plotting the company's post- breakup strategy. The same reasons that lure many companies to Orlando are given by company executives as the motivation for choosing Central Florida -- hospitable climate, availability of housing and a ready supply of non-union labor.

The center has one of the largest arrays of IBM or IBM-compatible mainframe computers and is probably one of the largest centers of its kind in the country. Collins said a similar, though far smaller, AT&T data processing center in Denver he used to manage was the largest such facility in Colorado. Still, the Orlando center is only operating at about half capacity, Collins said, as AT&T continues to make use of smaller, older facilities elsewhere.

''In terms of computing power, we're probably not half-full,'' he said. ''I think probably the general plan would be to move the smaller sites to the bigger ones.''

In addition to the center on John Young Parkway, AT&T has two other buildings in south Orlando where it does data processing, including an old warehouse on Exchange Drive formerly used by Walt Disney Productions.